And if she wasn’t precisely pretending to be fascinated any longer—if that was far more encompassing and real than she wanted to admit even to herself, if it lived in her and grew with every breath and she was starting to worry it might be taking her over—
It wouldn’t be the first time Miranda had to pay a steep price for something she should have known better than to want in the first place. The only good thing to come of having so badly miscalculated once before was that she certainly wouldn’t be likely to do it again. She’d lost her family the last time. She wouldn’t lose anything else, not if she could help it.
This time she’d be smart enough to keep her mouth shut.
* * *
When Miranda finally made it down into the villa’s main reception room, she felt like a stranger to herself—and looked it. She’d hardly recognized the alien creature she’d seen in all the mirrors, though she’d oohed and aahed as necessary and declared everything glamorous.
All part of her job, she supposed. Her performance.
At the bottom of the stairs, a man waited with two cell phones clutched in each hand, a headset clamped to his ear and acrobatically spiked hair, his impatience visible.
“Hi,” she said, feeling awkward when he didn’t speak. “I’m Miranda—”
“Your goal today is to maintain total silence,” he said, his attention flicking to one of his phones, his thumbs moving rapidly over the keyboard. “But without looking like you’re not talking.” She must have made some kind of noise because he looked up, and his expression shifted from disinterested to patronizing. “I handle Ivan’s publicity. Which means you need to follow my script.”
“I’m not an actress,” Miranda said coolly. She forced herself to smile. “So.”
“No cute comments about kissing,” the man shot back as if she hadn’t spoken. “The whole world knows you can talk. You haven’t stopped talking in years, into every available microphone. But we’re selling a love story here.”
“And in this love story the great vast swell of my emotions has rendered me mute?” Miranda asked drily. “How romantic.”
The man’s eyes narrowed.
“Craig.” Ivan’s voice came from the open doorway to one of the sitting rooms, a slap of sheer, raw command. “I have it from here.”
Craig stared at Miranda for a moment, and she stared back as if he was an overly entitled freshman in one of her core classes, and she didn’t have any idea how long that would have gone on—but one of his phones began to shrill, and he stepped away to answer it.
Which meant there was nothing to do but look at Ivan. She took her time about it, one hand still gripping the banister, and when she finally got up her nerve he had moved even closer. Too close.
He looked even more absurdly handsome than he usually did plastered across all those Jonas Dark billboards, and about ten times as dangerous. He was in a sleek black tuxedo, which Miranda had seen him in a hundred times before, in a hundred different magazines, posters, advertisements. Yet it was different, somehow, standing here with him in this perfect villa in this particularly beautiful corner of the Côte d’Azur. Dressed as she was in an over-the-top concoction of a formal gown and her face meticulously made up to look like someone else’s. Someone who belonged in this life, this moment. With this man. That had been her stylists’ main objective, hadn’t it?
To make a Columbia professor look like the sort of woman a major movie star like Ivan Korovin would actually be seen with.
His dark eyes swept over her now, taking his time and taking in the lush, vibrant sweep of the gown she wore. It was a strapless column of bright red, a shade she would have avoided because of her hair, but of course, no one had asked her for her opinion on the color. Or the cut, or the fit, or anything else. Ivan had chosen it, so she would wear it. That was the deal. She should find that offensive, no doubt. But this close, all she could seem to concentrate on was how magnetic he was, how impossibly compelling—she could feel it, heating up the air between them, making it seem to crackle.
Once again, she felt like his Parisian mistress from another time. Bought, dressed, adorned. Something deep inside of her turned over, way down there in the dark, and began to glow.